Dead Souls and the Global Press

“Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land!” Tennyson seems to have got his query answered with the emergence of “The Global Press”, a title self-bestowed on his paper by Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian.  It used to be the Manchester Guardian, a British newspaper for about 150 years, beginning about when Tennyson penned that line. The Guardian now aims to hover, first only partially, eventually totally, in the Internet with companions like Wikileaks and ProPublica.  It is their answer to the falling circulation of print newspapers.  Their target audiences are global citizens, who, like them have no particular attachment to any old-fashioned country. In their words, their readers are “engaged, anti-establishment” world citizens.  They now have the third-largest circulation on the internet of any English-language newspaper in the world.  Their larger aim seems to be to serve as a sort of global conscience, curiously identical to their own and curiously indifferent to the circumvention of the laws and needs of old-fashioned countries like England.  I wonder what their solution will be to the declining fortunes of England.

The Guardian is at the core of the Wikileaks and Snowden espionage incidents (for that is what they are).  The Guardian depicts Snowden as an earnest citizen striving to do Good, who nevertheless sought refuge, stolen material in hand, with the chief rivals of the U.S. and Britain.  They also laud him as a protector of information so highly skilled that the intelligence services of the world would be unable to crack his safeguards on the information, hardly the mark of a naïve private citizen shocked beyond endurance by its contents. The British Prime Minister pleaded for the material not to be printed, and the head of American intelligence warned them that its printing would put blood on their hands, yet they kept on publishing until, in their own words, “even our allies told us we were going too far.”  By then, they probably had.

The history of the Guardian’s involvement is carefully recounted without comment in an article in the October 7 edition of the New Yorker magazine.  Newspapers and magazines are careful about treading on the “free press” rights of other publications, but the New Yorker history speaks for itself.   In their rush to spill the beans about the Snowden and Manning revelations, the Guardian loosely allied with Wikileaks and the New York Times.  The Guardian’s purpose was to enable publication of the material in whatever jurisdiction had the lowest resistance to its publication.  The legitimate security needs of the U.S. and of their own nation seems to have been their lowest priority.  There is no international law against espionage or treason, and some grand vision of a global “need to know” appears to dominate their thinking.

The Guardian’s actions, and the Guardian itself, appear to be based on the evolution of the “floating world” I have mentioned, a world of people ranging from CEOs of major corporations to international intelligentsia to simply the massively wealthy, who form a global society that feels disconnected from and immune to the sovereignty and needs of any one country, even that in which they were born and raised.  They’re the crowd that comes together at places like Davos.   Newspaper reporters like The Guardian’s editor, Rusbridger, have now begun to feel at home among them.  Rusbridger’s personal history as recounted in the New Yorker seems to show he has spent as much time out of Britain as in.  There are virtues in the emergence of such a global culture, like sensitivity to human rights everywhere, but there are dangers also.  Only personal morality is a guide in such a culture; social norms are of every variety and there are no laws against anything that cannot be circumvented somewhere.  Thinkers and reformers from Socrates to Wesley have warned of the perils of relying only on individual conscience; it is undeniably self-serving and must be examined in the light of the rules of surrounding society, and the examination must include the views of others.  Else, as in this case, virtuous intent can produce unvirtuous action.  In the name of freedom of the press and to increase circulation, the laws of multiple countries are skirted and it produces “blood on the hands.”  It forms a kind of Libertarianism of the mind, a cheerful indifference to the needs of others in pursuit only of one’s own vision.  And it erodes that civic virtue hailed by Montesquieu and Mills as the glue that holds democracies together, for civic virtue includes not only Liberty, but respect for the laws and for the institutions that execute the laws.  

The laws of countries assume an alignment of the individual or the corporation or of institutions like the press with the interests of the country.  Corporations began as creatures of the sovereign, carrying out his intent; they no longer are.  People were genuinely tied to the country and to its interests; patriotism was assumed, and exile was a legitimate punishment.  Those ties no longer bind.  Now a “Global Press” is emerging, pledging allegiance to no country, and inhibited only by the views of like-minded allies.  Yet the laws of most democracies rightly protect freedom of the press as a necessary enabler of democracy itself.  Unlimited freedom requires responsibility, and that so far is lacking.  Freedom of the Internet is a clarion cry these days but responsibility for consequences is lacking.  Unless the Global Press grows up to exercise its freedoms responsibly, it simply becomes another set of self-serving multi-national corporations, dead souls preying on the nations that engender and defend them.